Caring for Bodies 1 Luke 10:25-37 INTRO: We re in the last of our five weeks talking about the major issues facing our community and our nation in this election season, asking ourselves what our Christian faith has to say about the issues, what we should be wrestling with as disciples as we make our decisions at the polls. And I know some of you are probably delighted that this is the last sermon in the series I admit that I m a little relieved myself. But I also hope that this series has helped you to go deeper into the issues themselves, beyond the personalities, and I hope it s helped you to stay grounded in Scripture and in relationship during an otherwise tumultuous time. I want to mention just briefly that many of you have asked about these sermons being accessible online and I have to just apologize that I m way behind in posting sermons to our website, but I do hope to catch up this week, so please be patient and those should be available shortly. And if anyone is feeling called to take that on as a volunteer position especially if you have experience with WordPress - I d love to sit down with you and show you the ropes so we can keep the postings more upto-date. [Scripture: Luke 10:25-37] [Prayer] In April of 2015, a full 18 months before the presidential election, The Atlantic published an article with the title, The Question That Will Decide the 2016 Election, and then offered the question, Will you take away my health insurance? That is the question, they said, that would decide the election. 2 Now, the authors of that article had no way of knowing everything that would happen between then and now and we have no way of knowing everything that will happen between now and November 8 (and it certainly seems like anything could happen at this point), so whether their projection of the priority of this question is true remains to be seen. But it is certainly one of the major questions facing voters when we go to the polls next month: what will happen to our health insurance? How will elected officials work to repair a system that almost everyone agrees is severely broken? And, since both parties suggest changes in the current system, how will the changes affect us personally and how will they affect the most vulnerable in our communities? What happens to our health and the health of our neighbors? Now, in this year s election, most of the conversation is about the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. This was the incredibly wide-reaching, complex legislation passed in March 2010 to expand healthcare coverage to more Americans. And Obamacare has done several things in the last 6 years: About 17 million people now have health insurance who didn t have it before, for whatever reason (many of those are young adults who were able to stay on their parents insurance plans until age 26, or low-income folks who now qualify for Medicaid) we now have the lowest uninsured rate since anyone has been tracking that statistic, right around 11%. 1 Statistics cited throughout are from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/27/us/is-the-affordable-care-actworking.html#outcomes and http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/health-insurance.htm, accessed 10.08.2016. 2 http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/the-question-that-will-decide-the-2016-election/391137/, accessed 10.08.2016. 1
The ACA prohibits lifetime caps on coverage so that one major incident or illness doesn t use up all the insurance coverage someone could have for a lifetime. The ACA has provided more people with preventive care and cancer screenings than ever before. People can no longer be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions. But, in spite of these positives, the cost of overall healthcare keeps rising; and even though there are subsidies available for many Americans to pay for their healthcare coverage, overall premium costs have been going up since the full implementation of the ACA in 2014. Both parties agree that the government has some role in healthcare that healthcare is, at least to some extent, a basic right. As it stands now, the difference is that the Republican platform calls for a complete repeal of the ACA and replacement with Health Savings Accounts; while the Democratic platform calls for keeping the ACA and repairing it to bring overall costs down and continue to decrease the number of Americans who are without health insurance. The question you may be asking is, What does this have to do with church? That s a great question. And the answer, like the legislation, is complex. For one thing, Christians have, throughout their history, been involved in healthcare. Since the year 325, when Christianity was legalized in the Roman empire, Christians have been building hospitals primarily to serve the poor. Even in the early days of America, the majority of hospitals were built by Christian groups to provide basic healthcare for the poor. When they began, hospitals weren t places to go for cutting-edge medical treatments: they were places for basic care for people who couldn t afford to have a doctor come to their homes. But after WWI, when huge advancements were being made in medicine and specialties were on the rise, hospitals became places for expensive technology and machines, where people could receive cutting-edge treatment and see top-notch practitioners. The poor started being priced out of the hospitals that were originally intended to serve them. At that time, very few Americans had health insurance about 10% in 1940. Then during WWII when companies could only pay fixed wages, they figured out that they could offer benefits to lure the best workers, even if they couldn t pay them more; and companies started offering healthcare coverage as a fringe benefit. By 1955, 75% of Americans had health insurance through their employers. Of course, this didn t provide any coverage for unemployed or retired people so in 1965, LBJ signed Medicare and Medicaid into law. All the time, though, healthcare costs were skyrocketing. In 1970, Americans spent $75 billion on healthcare. In 2010, that had increased 34 times to $2.6 trillion. The estimate by 2021, just five years from now, is that overall, we ll spend $4.8 trillion on health care. Part of this is because hospitals are paying more for technology and malpractice insurance. Part of it is because we are an increasingly unhealthy (primarily sedentary) population and frankly, if we believe our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, as Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6, part of our call as Christians is to take better care of our bodies and this will also lower the overall cost of healthcare. Part of the rising cost is because our expectations of medicine are different than they were a generation or two ago: we see doctors for many more ailments than we once did, we expect that we can and should live relatively pain-free for most of our lives, which was not the general expectation a few generations ago; and we avoid death like we never have before with the most expensive year, month, and week of our lives being the very last: we could lower these costs if we simply had hard conversations about end-of-life care with our families before we get there, and put our hope in the life that we re promised will come after this life is over. 2
Because of the astronomical and rising cost of healthcare, many churches have gotten out of the hospital business and sold to for-profit corporations. And because of the cost, many people have had to opt out of health insurance and simply visit the Emergency Room whenever they have a healthcare need that must be addressed, meaning they wait until they are very, very sick to see a doctor; and they forego preventive care, including prenatal care and well-child check-ups, making us, overall, much less healthy than if we all had a primary care provider who we saw on a regular basis. Now this is a Christian ethics issue in part because of stewardship: when the cost of something that we agree should be available to everyone increases so rapidly and so egregiously, it s a stewardship issue that calls us to be involved. But it s also a Christian theology issue because God cares about our bodies, and we are called to care about each other s bodies, as well. Our bodies aren t simply temporary homes for our spirits: there is something holy about the physical as well as the spiritual. Jesus, even though he was God, chose to inhabit a body like ours; he was resurrected in his body, meaning our bodies are redeemed, as well. We read in Genesis that our bodies are created in God s image, that God s very fingerprints are on our bodies, which means our physical health and our spiritual health are inextricably tied together. And, we can t read the gospels without seeing the way Jesus cares for people in their bodies. The thing he does more than anything else in his earthly ministry is physical healing. There are 31 individual instances of healing in the gospels in addition to all the mass healings Jesus performed, where the gospels just say, People brought out their sick, and he healed many people that day. When he sent out his disciples, Jesus told them, among other things, to go about healing people: not just casting out demons, but healing their physical ailments, their illnesses and their deformities. The works of the apostles after Jesus ascension were focused on healing. And, when asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus told a story about healing. I know you ve all heard the story of the Good Samaritan before. Many of you have probably heard dozens of sermons on it; you ve heard it explored from a myriad of viewpoints. But here s the thing: The expert in the law asked Jesus, What must I do to inherit eternal life? Or in other gospels, the question is, What is the greatest commandment? And Jesus answered, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself. And the legal expert asked a follow-up, to see just how far he had to go with this loving his neighbor. He asked, Who is my neighbor? And to answer his question, Jesus told a story about a man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and along the road were many caves, where robbers would hide and jump out and attack people. And this is just what happened to the man, who was robbed and beaten and left naked on the side of the road to die. A priest passed by and did not help him; a Levite, another religious figure, passed by and did not help him and we don t know why, exactly, those religious people didn t help the man, but the fact is that they didn t. And then a Samaritan, a half-jew, a heretic, an unlikely hero, stopped and became the Emergency Room for this man, pouring oil on his wounds and binding them with cloth, putting him on a donkey and taking him to an inn where he provided for all of the man s needs, saying, Look after him, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have. Jesus asked, Which one was the neighbor? And of course the answer was the Samaritan. And Jesus said, Go and do likewise. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God and love your neighbor. And then, to show us what loving our neighbor looks like, he told a story of healthcare. He said, this is what it looks like to love your neighbor, to bind his wounds and provide for his needs when he is weak and vulnerable. And that s our call, too: as Christians, we are called to care about the wounded and the sick and to take care of them, to provide for them. We can t not care about what will happen to healthcare 3
legislation in this election, because healthcare is wrapped up in our discipleship. How we provide care for one another whether physically binding wounds or paying into a system that helps people get care when they can t otherwise afford it is part of our call as disciples of Jesus. And here is where I think the conversation about healthcare reform has broken down: the vast majority of commentary that I have seen about the Affordable Care Act is from a completely personal perspective: have things gotten better for me personally, or not? The problem with that is that our call, as Christians, as followers of Jesus, isn t necessarily to advocate for the legislation that will be the most beneficial for us personally. If we are truly following in the footsteps of Jesus, we will be most concerned about the vulnerable among us, and our political decisions about healthcare reform will be focused on the needs of the most vulnerable people in our communities: there are brothers and sisters all around us who are, metaphorically speaking, lying naked and beaten on the side of the road. And Jesus is asking us to love our neighbors as ourselves. This is our call, not only in this election season, but throughout our lives. Now let me say one thing more, and then I ll stop talking about politics, at least for now, at least from the pulpit: this series was about polarization in American conversation about the issues we re facing and how we can be part of the solution and not just continue the problem. And I hope you will continue challenging yourself as I will continue to challenge myself to step back from the namecalling and mud-slinging, to be careful about the words that you speak to the people on the other side of these issues, to do the research on the issues instead of buying into sound bites on social media or 3-minute news segments. I hope you will engage people in conversation people who you know think differently about these issues, seeking not necessarily to convert them to your position but to understand them and to treat them with respect and to show them the love of Jesus that has the power to transform the world. I hope you will wrestle with the Biblical call to welcome the foreigner; and to believe in God s promises rather than the stories of fear the world is telling; and to trust not in handguns but in the name of the Lord our God; and to care for one another s bodies, especially the most vulnerable among us. But hear this: the most important allegiance that we can ever have is to Jesus. Aligning ourselves behind a candidate or with a political party, even in this very important election year, will never have the importance of following in the footsteps of Jesus. No one else will ever earn our allegiance the way Jesus did when he gave his life for us. No one else can promise the peace and hope and transforming love and grace that Jesus offers every day; not a Democrat, not a Republican, not an independent. Whatever we do, in this election and throughout our lives, it is imperative that we remember that our first priority is always to line up in the footsteps of Jesus. If we daily seek to be his instruments, if we work more and more to love like him, everything else will fall into place, and his love will transform our hearts, our conversations, our relationship, our community, and the world. Let us pray: God, help us to trust in you, to honor you, to be faithful to you with our conversations, with our bodies, with our votes. Help us not to be so swayed by the rhetoric of this season that we forget that our first allegiance is always to you; that you are the one and only God worthy of worship. O God, we offer our lives to you, and pray that you help us to be good neighbors, especially to the most vulnerable among us. This is our prayer. Amen. Rev. Elizabeth Ingram Schindler Faith United Methodist Church Issaquah, WA 4
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